On February 4th, the Department of Linguistics hosted a talk by Jessica Coon (McGill University), which was entitled "Invisible inanimates and the syntax of pronominal prefixes in Kanien’kéha".
The abstract of her talk is provided below:
This talk examines puzzles in the realization and distribution of agreement markers or “pronominal prefixes” in Kanien’kéha (Northern Iroquoian), with an empirical focus on (1) an alignment split in the stative aspect and (2) restrictions on the distribution of animate arguments. In order to account for patterns, I propose—in line with recent work on Algonquian and Dene languages (Oxford 2019; Lochbihler et al. 2021)—that inanimate nominals in Kanien’kéha lack person, number, and gender (“phi”) features altogether. I show that this proposal, together with standard assumptions about argument structure and agreement, allows for an account of the complex agreement patterns. However, if correct, the absence of phi-features on inanimates also requires a rejection of Baker’s (1996) Polysynthesis Parameter, a macroparameter according to which all arguments in polysynthetic languages must be morphologically referenced on the verb. The conclusion will be that polysynthetic properties of Kanien’kéha do not require appeal to a macroparameter, but rather can be seen as the cumulative effect of smaller independently motivated differences.